The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 eBook

to sit down without him, lest the dinner be spoilt.
In revenge, Tom was usually up first on week-days,
sometimes at such unearthly hours that Polly had not
yet removed the boots from outside the bedroom door,
and would bawl down to the kitchen for his shaving
water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was,
shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom
shaving has become an instinct. If he had not
kept fairly regular hours, Mrs. Seacon would have
set him down as an actor, so clean shaven was he.
Roxdal did not shave. He wore a full beard, and,
being a fine figure of a man to boot, no uneasy investor
could look upon him without being reassured as to
the stability of the bank he managed so successfully.
And thus the two men lived in an economical comradeship,
all the firmer, perhaps, for their mutual incongruities.

[Illustration: Forhisshavingwater.]

CHAPTER II.

A woman’sinstinct.

[Illustration: “Tomshambledfromthesitting-room.”]

It was on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of October,
ten days after Roxdal had settled in his new rooms,
that Clara Newell paid her first visit to him there.
She enjoyed a good deal of liberty, and did not mind
accepting his invitation to tea. The corn merchant,
himself indifferently educated, had an exaggerated
sense of the value of culture, and so Clara, who had
artistic tastes without much actual talent, had gone
in for painting, and might be seen, in pretty toilettes,
copying pictures in the Museum. At one time it
looked as if she might be reduced to working seriously
at her art, for Satan, who finds mischief still for
idle hands to do, had persuaded her father to embark
the fruits of years of toil in bubble companies.
However, things turned out not so bad as they might
have been, a little was saved from the wreck, and
the appearance of a suitor, in the person of Everard
G. Roxdal, ensured her a future of competence, if
not of the luxury she had been entitled to expect.
She had a good deal of affection for Everard, who
was unmistakably a clever man, as well as a good-looking
one. The prospect seemed fair and cloudless.
Nothing presaged the terrible storm that was about
to break over these two lives. Nothing had ever
for a moment come to vex their mutual contentment,
till this Sunday afternoon. The October sky,
blue and sunny, with an Indian summer sultriness,
seemed an exact image of her life, with its aftermath
of a happiness that had once seemed blighted.

Everard had always been so attentive, so solicitous,
that she was as much surprised as chagrined to find
that he had apparently forgotten the appointment.
Hearing her astonished interrogation of Polly in the
passage, Tom shambled from the sitting-room in his
loose slippers and his blue check shirt, with his
eternal clay pipe in his mouth, and informed her that
Roxdal had gone out suddenly earlier in the afternoon.